


A Conspiracy of Weasels

by NevillesGran



Series: The Storm Queen [2]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Anevka Mondarev, Anevka in absentia but still very present, Conspiracy, Tarvek Mondarev, Violetta Sturmvoraus, Wakes & Funerals, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:31:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7144853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Violetta was practicing her balance when the steward knocked on her bedroom door.<br/>"Come in, Falco!” she called, and dropped so she could hang off the tightrope to greet him. She still had to crouch as an intermediate step, but she was getting better.<br/>“You, ah, requested to know when the Prince received a new…subject.”<br/>“Oh.” She had requested that. "Thank you."<br/>He hesitated. “The…it is the Lady Anevka?”</p><p>(And so, or shortly thereafter, a plot began…)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Conspiracy of Weasels

**Author's Note:**

> "Conspiracy" is not actually a real-life plural noun for weasels, but I've decided that I simply don't care. It is now.
> 
> This fic previously appeared on Tumblr, pretty much exactly the same as here.

“Your Highness?“ 

 Violetta was practicing her balance when the steward knocked on her bedroom door. 

"Come in, Falco!” she called, and dropped so she could hang off the tightrope to greet him. She still had to crouch as an intermediate step, but she was getting better. 

She wished she were a full Smoke Knight rather than a half-trained Princess. She could steal herself away, actually _do_ something. 

Falco was nervous, his face a shade too pale and his posture even stiffer than appropriate. Not because she was wearing trousers and meeting his eyes upside-down from somewhere around his collarbone (higher than if she’d been standing, actually), with her daringly short hair hanging loose. He’d seen that before. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, tightening her ankles’ grip on the wire.

“You, ah, requested to know when the Prince received a new…subject.”

“Oh.” She _had_ requested that.

She wouldn’t have if Falco hadn’t been new, but he was. He didn’t know the steps yet to all the delicate dances of living in Sturmhalten, or that none of them included telling her anything if the-Prince-her-father didn’t send for her. Usually that was fine by Violetta: she didn’t want to know about his…subjects. Didn’t want to watch. But it’d been nearly six months since the last girl, and his tense impatience was filling the palace like every breath might break something.

Violetta didn’t _want_ to be relieved. She made herself keep her tight hold to the wire, not wavering an inch. “Thank you,” she said evenly. “That will be all.”

He bowed, still an edge too rigid - he would learn - and she watched him leave. 

Except he stopped at the door, turned back, bowed again. “Your highness?” His uncertain tone turned the statement into a question, of a man desperately seeking knowledge of the steps to a twelve-year-old mistress he thought, from roughspun trousers and hair she’d cut herself,  _might_ not have him killed. 

“The…it is the Lady Anevka?”

Violetta fell off the wire. 

.

It was a lovely funeral. 

That’s what everybody said. That’s what everybody always said, at funerals. The Prince’s test subjects rarely got them, certainly not that Violetta attended, but she had lost enough family members over the years - mostly to other family members knives - to know the forms. And Anevka had been family.

It was a lovely funeral, a lovely service, lovely flowers in a lovely cathedral and didn’t Anevka look so peaceful in her coffin. What a tragic loss, a beautiful, clever girl like that in a common laboratory accident. Nobody suggested it was anything else (they never did, even when the “accident” was a knife in the back.) Nobody commented that wasn’t it _odd_ for her to have been experimenting in a laboratory in Sturmhalten, when she was supposed to be studying in Prague. 

But Violetta caught Tarvek glowering when he should have been looking appropriately sad. So she slipped out of the reception when nobody was paying her mind (the usual state of things) (she preferred it) and found him on a pew in the middle of the cathedral hall - empty now but for Anevka’s elegant coffin on a dias in front of the pulpit. He was glaring at it, or in its direction, and flipping a small dagger over and over in one hand.

He sat at the very edge of the bench, nearly dead-center in the hall, so Violetta climbed unceremoniously over the back to sit next to him. Her skirts rustled, and nearly hit him in the head, but she wasn’t trying to be silent. “Hi.”

Tarvek didn’t even look up. They hadn’t spoken much since he went to Paris six months ago, or came back two days ago, once the Prince stopped thinking there might still be a working mind in Anevka’s shattered body and announced her death.

“I think Anevka would have liked all the make-up,” Violetta offered. “And the dress, and necklace, and earrings. She always loved being prettier than everyone else.”

Tarvek flipped the dagger particularly high in the air, snatching it back at the peak of its arc, and Violetta bit the inside of her cheek in self-chastisement. She wasn’t _good_ at this. She knew what he was thinking: the make-up hid a black eye, the corseted white gown two broken ribs, the necklace a syringe mark. Anevka had been a Smoke Knight all fifteen years of her life before she broke through, and a lady and a spark for the four years since then. She had _fought_ before they got her in the summoning engine.

The-Prince-her-father had donated the jewelry himself, from her mother the Princess’s ownerless (technically Violetta’s) collection. The less nice pieces.

Tarvek flipped the dagger high again, still staring mutinously in the direction of the coffin. The way he didn’t touch the edges of the blade, Violetta guessed it was poisoned. 

“ _I_ think-”

There was madness in his voice. Violetta dug her polished nails into his sleeve and pulled him to his feet before he could think of a good reason to fight her off. She dragged him to the end of the pew and through a discreet door in the side of the hall. He kept quiet without more prodding, which she appreciated, though she was perfectly willing to fight for it.

“ _What?_ ” he snapped finally, when they were alone in a small storage room for candles and incense. With the thick oak door shut, there was next to no light in the storage closet, but they were both Smoke Knights; they could see. The air was thick with tallow and spices.

“Whatever you’re about to say,” she retorted, “I don’t think you want to saw it where the harmonic resonators will record every word.”

Tarvek sniffed disdainfully. “What, the dross under the windows? Why do you think I was sitting in the center of the room? Those machines have a ranger of a few meters at _best_.”

“Yes, which is why there are more under the floor,” she said tartly. “This is my town. I know what’s in it. You’re going to get in trouble.”

She didn’t need to be good to interpret his skeptical expression. 

“I _do_ care! You’re my…”

‘Cousin’ was accurate, but meaningless. ‘Knight’ hadn’t been true for years. ‘A moderately decent human being’ was perhaps the most right, but belied by the accuracy of ‘cousin’, and anyway not exactly flattering.

“Yeah,” Tarvek said, deadpan, and shoved back past her. “Don’t worry, I’ll play nice.”

Violetta skipped around him and stood firm in front of the door. “No you won’t. Somebody’s going to tell you how sorry they are, how sad this is, and you’re going to say something stupid. Or to my father, or Grandfather, or Martellus, because you want a fight.”

“I do _not_ -“ he started.

Violetta’s hands balled into fists by her fine skirt. “How do you think I’ve felt all week?”

Tarvek didn’t miss a beat. “You’ve been doing very well _hiding_ it, _your highness_ ,” he sneered. “You and your father, who _killed_ her, and Grandfather _allowing_ this, and Martellus who she served _faithfully_ for most of her _life_ , and now he’s just _smiling_ and making _small talk_ with the _rest_ of you.”

“The rest of _us_.”

“ _Ha!_ If _I_ had the _right bloodline_ , _I’d_ —”

He checked himself. It would have been more comforting if he didn’t narrow his eyes at her and start pacing—no, _stalking_ —back and forth, only room for a couple steps each way in the glorified closet.

“Stop it,” said Violetta, her back against the door.

“No, no, it’s _brilliant_ ,” he muttered, staring at her with a greedy gaze that didn’t quite focus. He didn’t stop moving. “If we start _now_ , we can—”

“ _Stop_ ,” she commanded, and grabbed his arm. She didn’t bother with the coatsleeve this time—under the cloth, nails on his skin and through it. She kept them sharp for a _reason_.

“What the _hell?_ ” Tarvek yanked away, droplets of scarlet beading where her nails had pieced. They sprayed when he shook the arm, then brought it to his face to examine. The harmonics were already fading from his voice, replaced by indignation and a sliver of fear she didn’t have to strain to recognize. The usual family bequeathment. “Violetta, is that _paralytic?_ ”

She didn’t ball her hands into fists again; she held them out at her sides, ready to move. “Stop looking at me like I’m something you want to put on a _slab_.”

She could hear the shiver in her own voice, and that it was too tight and high. Childish and panicky.

“That is _not_ —oh. Storms.”

He came forward again. Violetta tensed. But he just leaned against a shelf of candles by the door and fished a vial out of a hidden pocket, telegraphing the movement, and started smearing its contents on his already stiffening arm. The rest of his posture was deliberately relaxed.

“Violetta, you’ve got to be the least sparky person I know,” he said, patiently like he was talking her out of a tantrum again. “Your father would have no reason to…”

Her thoughts usually stopped there, too. Except when they didn’t. Usually at night. Every since Anevka, to be sure.

“ _I_ have the bloodline,” she said quietly, almost fiercely—because the alternative was that the words keep shaking. “The Pr—Father. Grandfather. Great-grandmother Alscalia, and Aunt Vittoire and Uncle Zardilev and Aunt Rappacini, and you and Martellus and Anevka. I’m _next_.”

Tarvek shook his head. “I don’t see it. Seffie either, frankly. Neither of you have…”

He trailed off, running into some Spark concept he couldn’t explain.

“You can’t guarantee that,” said Violetta. He hadn’t even bothered to argue that her father wouldn’t put her in the summoning engine if reason arose, she noticed. It was well: she wouldn’t have believed him.

“Fine, then,” he said, and stepped away from the shelf, flexing the fingers on the hand the tincture on her nails had temporarily frozen. Whatever was in that vial must be good stuff—her paralytic was.

“Even if you break through,” Tarvek continued, “I won’t _let_ anything happen to you.”

“What,” she said flatly.

“I’m your Smoke Knight, aren’t I?” he asked with a faintly ironic smile. But a kind one. “Or I was. I’ll watch out—”

Violetta _knew_ kind smiles. She pressed against the door again, this time ready to turn the knob and dart out, and interrupted, “What do you want, cousin.”

Tarvek scowled at her for a moment before he smoothed his expression out again. (He was always better at that than Violetta was.) “Martellus is going to be a horrible king,” he said. “Don’t deny it—he’s overbearing and obnoxious, and Seffie got all the political sense. He’ll offend too many people to beat Wulfenbach, much less hold Europa together afterwards.”

“So?” she asked guardedly. “He’s the only one we’ve got.”

“But he’s _not_.” Tarvek grinned a mad grin. “Violetta, it’s only Martellus if we follow male primogeniture. But it’s nearly the twentieth century! If we took _Salic_ _Law_ into account…”

She pulled away. “You’re in a fugue again.”

He was—but it wasn’t the extra hum in his voice she knew better than to trust. It was the hungry gleam in his eyes. Non-sparks in their family had that too.

“You want to fight?” he demanded, low and intent. “ _Do it._ You _do_ have the right bloodline.” He started pacing again, barely constrained by the walls of the dark storage room, unlit by its thousands of ready candles. “You wouldn’t have to hide anymore. You could wear whatever horrible clothes you want. People actually _like_ you, you know, when you talk to them. You could _rule_ , and I’ll help, and we’ll make sure your father and his cronies in the Order _never_ touch _anyone else_.”

He came to a stop, and took her blood-tipped hand in both of his, while his sister lay on a bier two rooms away, bruises hidden by Violetta’s mother’s jewelry. In the reception hall beyond, the-Prince-her-Father presided over politely sad mourners again.

“I _will_ be your Smoke Knight again,” Tarvek promised her, “If you let me make you the _Queen_.”


End file.
